Radio
by I Am Not Amused
Summary: Five years after the Intersect War, the Browncoat survivors in Team Bartowski are trapped on a planet filled with Reavers, separated from half of their crew. For Hallowhedon. STILL UNFINISHED.
1. Trapped

**Standard Year 2517**

Chuck still hears the gunshots.

Blended together in a violent cacophony, a murderous symphony, he hears timeless echoes of hot lead slicing brutally through raw flesh. They're only memories, but he hears the meat packing factory sounds of bullet impact against Kevlar like they're playing out on a diorama in his lap. The war is long over, but he still hears rallying cries and trumpet calls and a thousand other calls-to-arms that were really calls-to-death.

Sarah shifts against him, snapping him back to the present. They're huddled in the rubble of an abandoned office building, third floor, pressed against a pillar that was once an upstanding example of modern, sterile clean but now features the cracks and dirt, the grit and insect infestation, of modern ruin. It's a microcosm of the whole city. Which is a microcosm of the whole nation. Which is a microcosm of the whole, which is a microcosm of the whole, which is a microcosm of the whole...

He lets her lean against him and he knows he shouldn't. They've been over this before. Shipboard relationships complicate things.

He doesn't sleep much anymore. Memories of gunshots aside, it's just not a good idea. He and Sarah and Casey, they take two hour sleep shifts, one at a time. One sentry stays with the sleeper, one sentry patrols.

They called the patrolman the early-warning system. If they died, it was an early warning to the others.

The Reavers are another few suburbs out, far as they can tell. Casey has become pretty good at guesstimating the distance of a pack based on a variety of factors. Like counting the seconds between the lightning and thunder to tell if the storm is coming or going.

They've had a lot of practice.

"Bartowski," Casey growls. "You're supposed to be sleeping."

Yeah, well, the last time he fell asleep Casey ended up with a solid square foot of flesh missing before he and Sarah managed to get the lone Reaver off of him.

He shrugs, and pushes himself up the pillar, his battle-worn and torture-scarred combat gear gathering the dust of abandoned buildings and dried blood on its upward travel. His adjustment stirs Sarah, and he neither ignores nor draws attention to the fact that she had been sleeping next to him.

He tries to forget that he could practically feel her warmth through their layers. He fails.

"My turn as early-warning." He tries to make it a joke. He fails.

He watches as she tries to match his level of faux levity. "My turn as babysitter, then."

Casey grunts and tosses his burly frame unceremoniously down on the pillar, intentionally on the exact opposite side from Sarah. She rolls her eyes and Chuck smiles, or at least the muscles that control the corners of his lips pull upward. It's hard to actually smile when almost everything smells like rotten flesh and burning hair.

"Be careful," Sarah says. He tries not to laugh.

What good is careful going to do?

He walks around the perimeter of the floor, checking the ruins in the distance for movement. The building they're in, it used to be twenty stories. Now you could see sky from the fifth. There are stairs that lead to nowhere and walls that crumble into modern art. The building's original ceiling is now laying in pieces around the building's ground floor, or crushed fine beneath the soles of so many shoes.

It's as beautiful as it is distressing.

He stretches, reveling in the cricks and cracks of his various limbs. They're almost a more present reminder of the war than his actual scars. The scars, after all, don't hurt anymore, whereas the muscle aches - the way joints lock up or lack response or simply _hurt_ - are there in every movement. Each time he turns too quickly, his knees talk. Every time he throws too hard of a punch, it reverberates through him like a masochistic version of "Dry Bones." The leg bone's torturing the knee bone. The knee bone's torturing the thigh bone.

The stairs from the fifth floor are still there, leading up into a space that used to be the sixth floor but now isn't. He's supposed to patrol, but figures having higher ground and three-hundred-sixty degree visibility works just as well. He sits on the top step, letting his legs dangle where the sixth floor is supposed to begin, where something more than _nothing_ once stood.

He doesn't watch the ground like he's supposed to either, so he figures he's a pretty lousy sentry. Instead, he gazes up at a night sky that looks enticingly benign. He sees no clouds and, when he looks straight up from his spot, no rubble. The peacefulness is an unfamiliar feeling, and probably the most relaxed he'll feel in weeks, or maybe even ever again.

He hears Sarah's footsteps coming up the staircase, knows they're Sarah's from their carefully hidden delicacy. He doesn't look at her.

"Hey," she says. Casey would say something about him not patrolling, but Sarah doesn't. He moves his gaze forward, but not toward anything in particular.

"Hey." He wants to ask her why she's there and not with Casey. Was it the man's snoring? Was it restlessness? Was it him?

He stays quiet.

"Anything out there?" There's subtext to that question that he ignores.

"I don't know." An honest answer.

He looks at her then, and just a short shift from looking straight ahead to noticing her in his peripheral vision, sitting two steps below him and letting her own legs dangle into the ether. Her hair is matted and dirty, with blood and skin crushed into it. Her face is sooty, scratched and tired. She's wearing about eleven thousand pounds of gear. She looks beautiful.

"What were you looking at?"

He almost answers "You." Almost reaches out to touch her. But he doesn't. Shipboard romances complicate things.

He changes the subject. "You think Ellie and Devon really are with their beacon?"

The answer is no. It would be stupid of them to stay where anyone with a locater could find them. Even if Reavers had wiped out everyone who actually had the mental faculties to _use_ a locater. Chuck knows that Sarah knows that the best bet for Devon and Ellie is to find a deep dark hole and try not to starve to death.

"Yes," she says. They both know it's a lie. "What's the plan?"

Before the war, she never asked him what the plan was. He was always the one asking her. Things change. He's the captain now. He's supposed to say that they'll cut across the face of Reaver territory, find Ellie and Devon at the beacon, then sneak back to the ship. He's supposed to be confident.

"Get to the beacon. Hope there's enough of Ellie and Devon to recognize."

"_Chuck._" She says it sharply, but with a deep inhalation of breath that betrays just how likely his scenario is. Still, the admonishment stirs up his blood. Maybe he _will_ finally turn into a Reaver, like every other Intersect host of the past hundred and fifty years.

"What do you want me to say, Sarah?" He turns toward her, his legs moving to the step that separates them. "That we'll find them in a fort made of couch cushions, eating protein and playing cards?"

She doesn't say anything. What can she say? He watches her eyes as they switch between fire and ice, and he can hear each one speak. First: how dare you question your sister and brother-in-law's survival skills, they'll have made it. Then: we need to have some sort of hope, even if its a fool's hope.

She turns away from him, her legs hanging petulantly over the side of the staircase. He tries to say something, but any words he has would cross a line they've been toeing since they first met. Maybe if it hadn't been for the war, maybe if he wasn't the captain. He, too, turns away.

Her voice is so soft he thinks it may be a ghost or a daydream. "They'll be okay." He hears it, knows it's a lie. Or at least something she can't know. He can hear the rest of her sentence even if she doesn't say it: _It won't be like with Morgan_.

"No. They won't."

"Chuck..." He hears her move, thinks he feels the phantom of her hand over his shoulder before it pulls away.

"Sarah, just..." He looks over his shoulder, back toward her. For a split second, he sees her before the war. It's either a memory or a dream he's confused for one, but it doesn't matter. She's running alongside him, and her gait is gazelle-long, stretching out in hurdler strides. She's got a laser pistol in one hand, held tightly in her fierce, protective grip. She looks angry but she looks gorgeous. She's running toward something because she never - _never_ - runs away from anything. He doesn't know what it is, but he knows that she's protecting him from it.

On the stairwell, he sees this memory of her and the real her blur together and maybe forgets for a moment why shipboard romances complicate things. He sighs. "Sarah, there are at least three hundred Reavers between us and the beacon. We have to circumnavigate them, making what should be a seven mile trip at least fifty. We have rations that would only last _me_ a day, and we have to feed you and Casey with them for five. Then we have to get back to the ship, remove the land lock, and get it repaired, all without attracting Reaver or fed attention." He snorts. "Do you really think we're going to make it out of that alive?"

The answer is no. They both know it.

"Chuck..." She huffs in frustration, which would be comical in any normal circumstances. "You should... You should just kiss me."

He doesn't let the surprise on his face show. Instead he smiles, wan and broken. "What sort of incentive would I have to survive, then?"

The silence and stars are a cold blanket, pulled across both of their laps. She wants more than he can give her. Wants something to hold on to. But he's an apparition now, has been since the war. There's nothing tangible to grasp, to _have_. She just doesn't see it.

Her hands pat her knees with something that attempts to approach finality, but comes off half-hearted.

"I should get back to Casey. Make sure he hasn't died."

He nods, and his head moves against his will just the slightest bit towards her. She notices. "Might be better if he had. He'd be enough food for us to make this trip."

Her expression darkens. "Don't say that."

He nods. Doesn't apologize, but recognizes his error.

He looks away again, into the ruins of affluence that surround them. He hears her boots clack and echo against the staircase as she retreats down it. It sounds like it lasts forever. Maybe it does.

"Sarah." It comes out of his mouth before he can stop it, and his body seems to turn back to her not of his own volition. He hears one last clack of a footfall, and sees her turn back towards him in kind.

She's crying. Not exactly crying, actually, just the faint glaze of saltwater in her eyes. They seem bluer than he's ever seen them.

None of the tears fall.

"I've never asked you for anything, Chuck." There's passion and pain and a hundred other emotions he's forgotten in those words. "I never _wanted_ to. But I'm asking for this: I'm asking for you to have some God damn _hope_, okay?" She even stamps her foot when she says it, and it would be adorable if it wasn't so sad.

"Okay." It surprises him when he says it. It shouldn't. He's never been able to say no to her.

"Okay?"

"Okay."

She smiles then and she looks like a girl. She doesn't look like a survivor or a fighter or a veteran of war. She doesn't look like a colleague or a partner or a crewmate. She looks like a girl.

She's about to turn around again when he says it: "Sarah?"

"Yeah, Chuck?"

"I will... I'll kiss you. Okay? When we get out of this. I'll kiss you." It's not much. It's not real. It's not something to hold onto. But it's all he can offer her when the air is filled with the sweat of a thousand daily murders.

She nods, still smiling.

"Looks like I have some incentive to survive, then," she says.


	2. The Intersect War

**Five Years Prior...**

For one incredible second, there's silence.

The bombs stop, the gunfire ceases, the yelling of thousands of soldiers goes quiet.

And in that second, Chuck _thinks_.

It's easy not to think in the kineticism, in the movement, in the blood and guts and viscera. It's not easy to think in the noise, the restless yells and painful screams, the booms and ratatats. Thought becomes secondary, a slave to survive, survive, _survive_. It becomes pushed behind tactics and troop movements and how far to aim in front of a moving target.

In the silence, Chuck swears he can hear the voices of everyone he's killed in this war.

The silence is over quickly and time shoots forward desperately, as if it had stopped for a moment and is now furiously scrambling to catch up. A seeker's high-pitched whine breaks it, and Devon shouts, "Move, move, move, move, _move_!" before tossing a flare as high as he can into the air. Chuck watches with morbid curiosity as the tiny missile flies through their group, and he flashes on it as it passes, pictures of a woman enjoying a piece of strawberry cheesecake and a bumblebee flying upside down mercifully staying with him far longer than the technical specifications and blueprints of the deadly machinery.

He's the only Intersect the Browncoats have, and that makes him kind of like a big deal.

The seeker explodes, setting off the thousands of other noises of war: skin being ripped apart by knives and the toy box clatter of machine gun shells clinking against each other as they fall from the chamber, the porch lamp hum of a laser rifle charging and the shocked non-gasp of the freshly dead. Chuck can't think anymore, in the return of sound, but he still sees the ghosts of those he's killed walking with him like they're his partners.

In time, he knows some of them will be.

It's a tight, practiced movement of his arm that motions the seven of them through the mouse hole gap in the chain link fence, and he's practiced it a hundred times so that he gives it now with authority or at least something approaching it. He's the only Intersect the Browncoats have. When he was the only Intersect anyone had, he could afford to be awkward and bumbling and unsure. Now, he can't seem weak, has to put makeup on to cover the gashes in his cheeks and the bags under his eyes when he gives a speech he hopes is rousing but is too tired to notice anything beyond his soapbox podiums. He's a symbol to people, so he damn well better be able to command a team with an arm movement.

Sarah's the last one in before him, and she lingers. One second, two seconds too long and he wants to stop and touch her and get in the ship and leave for another planet with just her but he's an icon, a symbol, so he can't. She's looking at him like he's still just Chuck. She reaches out her hand, wanting to brush it against his arm or hand or something, he knows, so he clears his throat.

"We, uh-" he curses himself at the pause, it gives him away. "We don't have much time." He should have taken the time to gather himself, to push her scent out of his nostrils. Yes, it's dirt and grime and blood but also somehow peach and vanilla. She retracts her hand, and the corners of her eyes pull down because she knows- that damn pause- that he's only saying it so she won't touch him.

War time romances complicate things.

"Right." She enunciates the word so the last consonant pops like the crackle of a headset.

He watches her go.

She's beautiful.

His team, they converse with their kills. Casey's rifle shouts quick, staccato war cries. Devon's pistols speak the medical jargon of surgical precision. Sarah's knives weave eloquent passages through veins and arteries. They carve through the supply depot with Shakespearean wordplay. Morgan's shotgun blasts stutter with the fear of public speaking. Alex, she repeats her father's words but in the higher octaves of smaller weapons. Ellie's armed with the protective, motherly words of morphine injections and heavy bandages.

Chuck, he stays quiet. He has to command armies with an arm movement. He has to kill armies without a whisper. His silenced pistol is an unsung lullaby.

If they can get to the radio tower, they can stop the radio wave Intersect updates. If they can stop the updates, they can keep their battle formations and known tactics out of the enemy's head. If they can disrupt the signal, they have a ghost of a chance.

This Intersect War, it's not ugly. There are no unclean tactics or unclean surfaces. The Alliance and their Intersect soldiers, they tend to eliminate the Browncoat resistance with the antiseptic accuracy of medical robots. The war, it's white buildings and white uniforms and white weapons and white battleships with nary a scratch or wound on them, operating in stopwatch gearwork.

It's not _life_.

Chuck's knees buckle not from impact but from anticipating the impact before it happens, hearing the breath of his attacker behind him, feeling the glint of the knife swinging towards his head. He ducks his body in a tight roll and the blade flashes over him in a deadly arch. The flash that hits him, it's Brazilian jujitsu. Effective, but he ignores it, knowing that the other Intersect will know he'll flash on that first. Instead, he flashes again, this time on floor gymnastics and he somersaults out of the way, one of Sarah's throwing knives darting out from the arch of Chuck's back at the last possible moment, embedding itself in the guard's throat.

He sees the blood, knows the science of pressure and angles that causes it to squirt out like a faulty park fountain. He tries to be as objective about it as possible. Kill or be killed and this is war and war is hell and hell is other people.

He still knows he'll see the man during the nightmares he can't have in the sleep he doesn't submit to.

They come up with plans that look forward no more than a day, because it's all they can reasonably expect to survive. Each one carries the more-qualifier-than-inspiration phrase "only hope." Holding this hill for six more hours is our only hope. Sneaking aboard an abandoned train car is our only hope. The phrase gets used so often that, despite its honest, it loses meaning. This next step is our only hope.

The truth is, though, that getting to the radio tour, it's their _only hope_.

He leads his team through the train station that defends the radio tower, filled with the husks of train cars like the corpses of monolithic guard dogs. They speak at each other in weapon fire on the way in, and even in the way her knives sing and her pistols shout, Chuck hears her questions. Questions about why they were so distant, when it had always been her who maintained that distance. Questions about when he had grown so cold, when he had learned it from her.

As they approach the radio tower, his team looks at him. He responds only with a minute movement of his head, inclining it backward and about sixty-three degrees to the right, but it communicats a complex pincer formation that will allow them to cut through to the staircase without a group of Intersect soldiers converging on them.

They split off into their normal groupings: Devon and Ellie, Casey and Alex, Morgan and Sarah.

Sarah, she hesitates a moment too long in breaking off from the pack, and he can tell she's indulging herself when she looks back over her shoulder at him. There aren't questions in that gesture, only statements. _Be careful_ and _Don't get hurt_ and _I'll see you at the rendezvous_ and maybe even _I love you._

He's been down that road before, though. He shakes his head, breaking their eye contact and pointing her down Morgan's path.

He hopes to God there isn't an Intersect update in the middle of all this.

The sheet-white face of the war was gaining flecks of blood red. With every Intersect update broadcast to the Alliance's torrent of soldiers, it broke a few more of their minds. Like computer hard drives, breaking down after being rewritten and rewritten so many times, the minds of these soldiers snapped. Everyone was different. Some could take fifteen, twenty Intersect updates. Some could take only one or two. Everyone broke. Every Intersect update held over it the threat of another new batch of Reavers. Maybe just one or two. Maybe five hundred. Maybe every single soldier in the Alliance military.

Maybe Chuck.

He's the only Intersect the Browncoats have.

He's also the only possible Reaver.

A silenced staccato burst of gunfire spits, frustrated, into the neck and head of an Alliance soldier that appears from between two abandoned train cars. Chuck runs, flashes covert infiltration, grabs the man's body and lowers it to the ground gently, not allowing the thud to alert any of the others.

It's not a moment before he hears the gunfire from his other teams and he feels that panic, that animal fear, that one of them has died. He feels the creature darkness that one of his six fired too slowly, or off target, or was somehow outmaneuvered. He feels the lead-heavy anxiousness that a bullet meant for him is embedded in one of them.

It's stupid and it's pointless but (A) what isn't here? and (B) he can't help himself; he runs. His boots leave tire-tread Vs in the dirt, and it makes this grating, rusty zipper noise and he knows he's attracting attention but he doesn't care. Another Intersect tries to soccer tackle him, and in the middle of his leap he flashes on gymnastics, turns his bog-standard jump into a complex mid-air three-hundred sixty degree flip and fires one of his pistols directly in the other man's eye. When he lands he feels the Intersect push himself off the ground again, back into another flip so he's again facing forward and as always he's terrified - completely fucking terrified - of how complete it is, the Intersect's control.

When he gets to the staircase, he counts them like it's a test - _one two three four five six - _right in a row as quickly as his mind can do the arithmetic. It's wordless how he goes up the stairs, marching toward the control room of the radio tower.

There's a moment, in all of the noise and confusion disguised as militant efficiency and explosions that Chuck actually feels _hope_. The stairs, they melt away beneath his feet and he hears the clash-clang-bang-bash of their collective boots and they might make it.

They might make it.

He reaches the door and it feels like a _moment_. Like something he'll remember forever. The Intersect, it flashes on room clearing tactics, but he waits. The Intersect pulls at his muscles and he always gets a headache when he fights the Intersect, but he has his team for a reason.

Sarah and Casey, they stay on either side of the door, and he and Awesome stay on the opposite side. They're quiet, and they can hear the nerves and tension-wire bristling of the five soldiers inside, but they rig up a string to open the door instead of their hands because the soldiers know a doorway is as good as a bottleneck.

The soldiers, they're predictable. They fire as soon as Chuck yanks the door open with his makeshift kit, wasting bullets and time. It's when they stop that Sarah does what Sarah always did when she and Casey (and he) were upstanding members of the Alliance. There's no elegance in her brute force takeover of the room. It's just _blam-blam-blam_, big sledgehammer-subtle offense and they're gone and Chuck remembers how she used to remind him of a Valkyrie.

It's anticlimactic, shutting down the tower. It's just the press of a button first, then when Chuck suggests they should reprogram it so it won't turn on again, Casey just rips out a few motherboards.

It feels big, like an accomplishment. In the post-mission glow, though, Chuck remembers that it isn't. It just means that they know what they're up against now. It means that the Intersects can't update again. It means no more Reavers on this planet. But it doesn't make the Alliance soldiers less accurate, less deadly.

All it _really_ means is that this planet won't fall for another month or so, instead of another day or so.

When he walks outside, Alex is crying.

For a few moments, he can't figure it out. She's sitting on this step and she's crying. Why would she be crying? He puts his hand on her shoulder and her it's just a slight incline of her head, backwards and about sixty-three degrees to the left, but it's enough.

Morgan, his head is in her lap, and his chest is covered in blood.

"He shot him," Alex keeps saying over and over, and she haphazardly points with her pistol down the stairs at the body of an Alliance soldier. "He shot him, he shot him, he shot him."

He reaches for Morgan and it feels like a _moment_. Like something he'll remember forever. Morgan, he's got a smile on his face through it all and Chuck didn't see it but he knows that he took the bullet for Alex because that's what Morgan would do.

For one incredible second, there's silence.

And Chuck, he knows that now he'll see Morgan's ghost walking beside him.


	3. Whitefall

**Two years before the Intersect War...**

Chuck is sure that he's never heard true silence until this moment.

Years on Osiris, he slept through the vicious hum of Allied living, the muted neon buzz of innumerable planetary transports dashing to and fro, the half-cocked explosives of interplanetary ships leaving and entering the atmosphere. Then, as a willing tool of the government, the Accidental Intersect, he'd slept on those very ships, shuttled from Core planet to Core planet, from Rim to Rim, to sniff out revolutionaries and usurpers, and was rocked to sleep by the glowing combustion of nearby engines. And after Sarah heard about the Gamma Intersect Project, silence had been even louder than he had remembered, as the clean and well maintained machinery of Alliance craftsmanship made barely a whisper in comparison to the ugly chainsaw roar of piecemeal carrier vessels.

He and Sarah, they're in the middle of Whitefall and the silence is so complete and so foreign that he can't even sleep. He feels like he's sleeping with his eyes open, or a corpse that can still see. The tent that they're in is nothing more than a scrap of canvas stretched across a few wooden stakes and the loudest sound is when the wind ripples the fabric like the waves of a bio-luminescent lake. The canvas of their tent, it's the color of parched bone that's been sitting in the desert sun, and when it moves it looks like skeletons raised from the dead.

They're in Whitefall's northern hemisphere, he knows. The one that perpetually leans toward the planet and thus away from its star, so during nights like this the very air shivers with inferiority, literally in the shadow of its big brother, and the temperatures drop precipitously.

They're in the tent together, the two of them. He can feel her sleeping bag rubbing against his own sleeping bag. It's a sick mockery of human contact, but he can't help but notice it, even feel enticed by it.

He turns on his side, facing away from her.

They're on the run.

Sarah, she had told him that runaway romances complicate things. She had told him one mission at a time.

He watches the wind rip at the canvas where it stretches tight against the dry, barren ground. It looks like the opposite of a tributary: multiple tracks of vast dry nothing, intersecting together to form one infinite loop. The wind, it whistles in from the gap between the two sets of overwrought, stretched-tight skin and sounds a bit like the secrets Sarah discovered.

That the Alliance is building an Intersect that anyone could use. That they've finished developing the architecture. That they're less than a month away from an assembly line of soldiers, stepping out into battle with advanced military tactics and instant facial recognition fresh off the shelf. That this new Intersect, this Gamma Intersect, is upgraded through radio waves.

That Chuck is expendable.

He shuts his eyes tightly because he's supposed to be asleep. He shuts his eyes tightly because he doesn't want to think about the Alliance- the government he had worked for, paid taxes to, voted for, and supported his entire life- discarding him like they had discarded the Rim.

Sarah shifts.

It's autumn.

The leaves in the dark outside, they're crisp and pale gold. They tear from the delicate tree limbs they cling to and snap against the tent. They zig-zag angry paths through the sky, and even with the wind howling and the leaves crinkling and the canvas of the tent flapping, everything just sounds so quiet.

He hears Sarah breathing. Her cadence is familiar at this point, familiar enough that he can determine when she's faking sleep and when she's actually asleep. That particular ratio had started out heavily weighted in the "fake" category. In the months they've been on the run, the balance has shifted. He can't remember the last time she had enough energy to pretend to rest.

Chuck resists the urge to turn toward her, to see the golden wheat of her hair facing away from him, because it reminds him of how close and how far away she is.

They almost kissed once. That seems important even though it probably isn't.

The ground of Whitefall, it looks flat from a distance. When you stare out at a plateau from its crest and see the vast tracts of nothing, it almost looks like wooden floorboards, covered with grit and dust. In reality, the land has a personality of its own. While Chuck had become used to flat surfaces - sleeping hidden in cargo holds, packed into ammunition boxes - the living, breathing ground didn't give way so easily to the complicated contours of the human spine.

He wonders, not for the first time, when Casey will catch them.

Sarah, he knows, would chastise him for thinking of it in terms of "when." But even she's running out of steam. They've been on Whitefall too long. They missed the last transport ship coming through in months. They've haven't covered their tracks as cleanly as she (even as well as _he_) would like. They're hungry. They're perpetually tired. When they can bother to speak, they're at each other's throats.

They almost kissed once.

At some point, Casey - or the Hands of Blue - will find them.

And then what?

He's not safe anywhere. He's become a legend to the people of the Rim, a kind of bogey monster bed time story, for discovering and destroying poorly conceived revolutions and coup d'etats. And the Alliance is after him with the kind of single-minded determination usually only achievable through the basest of animal instincts. They follow him like a starving predator after the single, sick prey trailing behind the rest of the pack.

For no real reason, a memory comes to him in vivid technicolor detail, more fruitful and lifelike than anything that's happening to him now in this decaying night. He remembers being shoulder to shoulder with Sarah, packed into the hidden smuggling compartment of a transport ship that they had sneaked aboard. They were trying to control their breathing so the ship's dozen or so occupants wouldn't be able to hear it. Chuck remembers how he had been close to hyperventilating when Sarah had threaded one hand through his hair, wrapping her fingers gently around the back of his head. She had brought his face closer to hers and for all the world Chuck thought she was going to kiss him. Instead, she brought her lips to his ear instead and had whispered, "Things are going to be good again some day."

Chuck shivers against the wind and doesn't know if he believes her. He thinks he probably doesn't.

He abandons sleep, turns on the holographic game of Chinese Checkers that he stole from the cargo holds of one of the ships they had secretly hitched. He's about a third of the way through a game, playing himself at all six positions. It's hard, playing that way when you know all the moves that your opponent is going to make, so Chuck only gives himself three seconds to make a move with any given colored piece.

It's only just enough to keep the whole game from reaching an unwinnable stalemate. It's only just enough to keep himself distracted.

After a few rounds, he feels more than hears Sarah rustle around to turn toward him.

There are a few moments of silence where he knows she's watching him and he resists the urge to turn around. Finally she asks, "Who's winning?"

"I am."

From her lack of response, Chuck figures she doesn't find that funny.

He plays a few more moves. "Am I keeping you up? I can turn it off if you want."

"No, it's fine."

The wind sounds like tea kettles of various sizes filled with different amounts of water, howling their temperatures at dissonant pitches through the brittle air.

There would have been a time when Chuck would have wanted nothing more than Sarah's undivided attention. Now, feeling her staring at his back, feeling the heart breaking warmth of her body even through two sleeping bags leaning so closely to his, feeling his own body want to lean back into her, he just wishes she would turn away and leave him to his Chinese Checkers. Chuck, he feels chased by ghosts on nights like this, and the faint whispers of Sarah's touch and breath just give them tangible form.

"Don't give up, okay?"

"Okay." The words surprise him coming out of his mouth. But, then, he's never been able to ignore a direct request from her.

"We're going to get out of this," she says. And he believes her. And he doesn't believe her for one second. The wind attacks the tent's brittle bones and the ocean of gray is illuminated in different colors by the holographic set of the checkerboard, giving it a sort of mocking liveliness; it's still dry death, just in component resolution.

"Okay," he says.

"Okay," she says back, and her tone is so familiar and warm - an echo of how they used to speak to each other when life wasn't conducted on stolen protein packs - that Chuck kind of wants to tuck her hair behind her ear.

But they're hopeless. Or the situation is. Or both. Whatever.

The classification the Alliance had given Chuck was "Useless, but dangerous." They had ordered him to be killed on sight. Chuck's pretty sure that they look at him now as an old piece of machinery that's dangerous because of what it has heard.

It's hard to feel differently.

He hears Sarah shift again, feels it against his back and he wishes that there was something for them, some promise of better. Instead, it feels like aimless wandering and the only purpose is to survive the next second, the next day, the next year, and each one gets exponentially harder.

Chuck, he wants to know what Sarah's plan is, but he knows the answer is just to stay alive.

In his darkest moments, he's not sure if that's enough.

She's there, next to him and with him, but most of the time she's somewhere else, her mind plotting their next escape, or looking for a subtle embankment that will provide the natural cover for their bare bones hideout. Her most common activity is shining the barrel of her pistol, right behind attempting to fashion tree branches into fishing poles and searching through her memory to decide if a particular nut or berry they've come across is poisonous.

They almost kissed once.

In his darkest moments, he's not sure if that's enough.

Chuck hears Sarah exhale deep and strong, and he chances a glance over at her. The red and green lights from his holographic checkerboard bounce off the strands of her hair. It illuminates dust particles that make it look dry and oil from it being unwashed, it casts her haphazardly handled mane in morbid Christmas colors, and he thinks of the saddest holidays that he's had, the years between his mom leaving and his dad leaving.

He remembers something Sarah said when she told him about the Gamma Intersect. He remembers her saying, "We're leaving."

It either means he's broken the cycle or has simply become the successor to his parents' legacy.

The checkerboard glows bright for a few seconds, indicating it will turn off soon, so Chuck makes his move. He takes a hold of one of the black marbles, holding it delicately between his thumb and forefinger. It's a pointless gesture; the marble merely responds to his bioelectric energy. Somehow, it still seems as though he can feel the smooth, tactile hardness of the object between his fingerprints. He examines the way the light both reflects off of it and shoots through it, tricking the mind into thinking it's both solid and transparent.

He returns his hand to the board and makes his move, jump-jump-jump-jump-jump.

The last black marble falls into place.

Chuck, he wins.

The board glows even more brightly for a moment, a solid black light that eats up everything in the tent, swallowing both his and Sarah's bodies whole. It's only for a moment, but it suddenly feels cold. Then, it's gone. The board's pieces blink out of existence; they were never really there.

He wins.


	4. Taps

**Two years after the Intersect War...**

The sound quality of the trumpet, weathered by age and an incalculable number of formatting changes, is appropriately degraded, Chuck thinks. It sounds lonely, and the way the ends of high notes and the rumble of low notes are clipped makes it more so. Pumped through the ship's speakers, the brutal solo piece travels through the wiring and comes out mutilated and garbled, static buzzing like angry wasps in the background. It's horrific, but it's also haunting and kind of beautiful. Basically, it fits.

The five of them, they stand around the open airlock and they don't say anything. Ellie, she's crying into Devon's shoulder and he has his arm wrapped around her. His face is vainly trying to put up an imitation of stoicism, but there's too much sadness in his eyes to pull it off. His arm, the one that's wrapped around Ellie, is tense enough that the veins and sinew pop out and flex with each held-back sob. Sarah's left foot dangles into the airlock hatch, the right on the floor of the cargo hold, that right leg clutched tightly against her chest. She's staring into the hatch blankly, and listening to the music blankly, and even crying blankly; the wet marks that stain her cheeks are virtually unnoticed. In all the time he's known her Chuck doesn't know if he's ever seen her so lifeless.

He thinks, with no small amount of bitterness, that now she knows how he feels.

It's Casey that Chuck's watching, though. The man breathes like a coiled viper, each inhalation vibrating across his flesh and tensing in preparation of an upcoming strike. He ripples with undirected anger and Chuck is pretty sure he's going to spontaneously combust at any moment.

Chuck, he knows that Casey wants to go somewhere, _anywhere_, and murder every damn villainous thing there, man, woman, or Reaver.

But what Casey really wants to fight, he can't.

The trumpet, it's playing "Taps."

They had come across the microchip during one of their jobs doing something entirely unrelated for people entirely unsavory. Ever since the Intersect War, unsavory people are the only kind left on the Rim, and they make up the majority of those on Core worlds, too. They look at Chuck and his crew and they sneer, because they see one of the galaxy's most famous men doing odd jobs for the vultures. They're picking his bones and they know he knows that.

The cargo they had stolen, it had been maddeningly trivial, but they had found this microchip with an audio signal embedded into it and they had played it when they returned back to the ship, and the unearthly sounds of that trumpet soared over the speakers and seemed to go straight through them.

The truth is, it's probably worth more than the ship, all of its cargo and parts and people combined. They could sell it to a black market dealer and never need even a single coin again, even split between all of them. The source recording, Ellie thinks it's probably from some time in the 1970s.

Casey, he walks over the bottom air lock and looks in one more time, like he's forgotten or just is trying to make himself see something else. But just like every other time, Alex's cold and lifeless body stares up at him as the trumpet plays, wrapped in the blankets that have to serve as a body bag.

They don't even have enough to cover her face.

Chuck closes his eyes and he can see the way that she'll become space debris: the blankets will slowly unravel themselves in the lack of gravity, peeling away until they're waving flags that will eventually disappear to the horizon. Then Alex's body will rotate, end over end, her body position held only by rigor mortis, through the infinite nothing, until some random ship- maybe theirs- comes upon it, the frozen corpse rolling around and probably getting caught in the latches of the lower airlock.

Returning from whence it came.

"Taps" ends, that last mournful note ringing achingly through the cargo bay, and Chuck presses the button that closes the hatch so unceremoniously that Sarah practically jumps out of the lower airlock's hole and Casey actually makes a move as if to go at him. In a minute or two, the ship will automatically flush her body out with garbage and scrap metal, which is only fitting because everything for the past five years has been almost comically awful. Why should death be any different?

Chuck doesn't let it affect him. He can't, he's the captain. But he can't stand it anymore, seeing how eventually she'll just be debris stuck under their nose. He starts walking toward his bunk.

He's surprised but not really when Casey grabs him by the collar and shoves him into the nearest wall. The clang bounces off the interior like the trumpet had been a moment before, and it knocks the wind out of Chuck. The rest of the crew, they make a quick move and then stop like some bizarro world version of the children's game Red Light, Green Light.

"Where the hell do you think you're going, Bartowski?" Casey sneers as he says it, his muscles poised and tensed, looking for an outlet for his frustration.

"To my bunk, Casey." Chuck's voice is resigned, but undercut with a cold edge that has sneaked up on him since the end of an Intersect War the Browncoats won only because all of their enemies were now bed-time story monsters.

"To do what?" Casey reaffirms his grip on Chuck's collar, slamming him against the wall again. "Go to another backwater planet, try to make another piddling amount of coin, and get another one of us killed in the process?"

Chuck knows it's dirty, but he hides his flash well enough that Casey look is all surprise when Chuck is somehow behind him and shoves Casey's face into the wall that Chuck's head had been banging against.

"Oh I'm sorry, Casey. I guess I really should have predicted a lethal parasite that no one knew existed."

Casey struggles against Chuck's grip, but Chuck's long since being intimidated by Casey's strength. He leverages Casey's arm further, halting the larger man's efforts. "You think this isn't hard for me, too?" he asks, his voice rising from its prior sarcastic growl to an indignant shout. "You think I don't see her as my family, too? She was _my crew_, Casey!"

Casey summons up enough strength to break Chuck's grip, turning around so they're practically nose to nose. "Don't you _dare_ act like you have any idea how this feels, Bartowski. I lost a _daughter_, damnit. Who have you lost? That bearded gnome you called your friend?"

The words are out before Chuck can stop them. "Oh, that's right, because I only knew Morgan my entire life. And how many years have you even known you were a father?"

Everything stops for a moment, and even Casey looks shocked. In the pause, Chuck sees the rest of the crew watching like the audience of the Colosseum duels from Earth-that-was. But they're looking anywhere but him. Chuck realizes they think he should feel ashamed. He doesn't know if he does.

The shock is gone from Casey's expression almost instantly, and his lips turn up in a familiar sneer. "What, you've grown a pair since the Alliance upgraded the shiny toy in your head?" Chuck bristles, but Casey continues, leaning toward Chuck in mock-conspiratorial fashion. "But, see, I remember when you were Walker's drooling, useless little pet who she was dragging through the seedier parts of the Rim, who couldn't even piss without being instructed how. I remember you hiding behind her skirt when you thought I had come to kill you."

"Fuck you, Casey."

Casey's smirk, if anything, grows wider. "I'm going to enjoy shooting you in the head when you finally turn into a Reaver."

"Stop it! The both of you!" It's Ellie who snaps out of the crew's collective reverie first, her broken voice splatting off the metal hull and shattering in the air.

Casey's head snaps up, and Chuck can see the pain in Ellie's voice reflected back on Casey's face.

He's a coward. He's always been a coward. Even every time he's been brave, he's probably been a coward. He takes the silence as his cue to leave.

"Chuck!" It's either Sarah's voice or Ellie's voice or both, but he ignores it.

Casey snorts. He says either "Typical, Bartowski" or "Typical Bartowski," though it doesn't really matter which.

Chuck stops for a just a moment. When he speaks, he doesn't even bother turning around. "I'm sorry I saved all of your lives so much that you started taking it for granted, Casey."

He leaves.

His steps list slightly, a fact Chuck determines only through their desperate echo against the ship's floor. The left foot falls, then an awkward hiccup then the right foot falls. Over and over. A few years ago, Chuck would have thought it meant something. Now he knows that it's only the result of Casey hurting his ankle.

There used to be a time when Chuck thought that things had a purpose or a reason. Now he knows too much, can see the science and the facts of everything around him. How bones break and how time works and how the ship runs, there's no mystery to any of it. There's just the objective truth.

Chuck keeps seeing Alex's face.

The planet they had been on had been unlike most of the Alliance's attempts at terraforming. Slightly closer to the sun than most planets humans had attempted to inhabit, it had been tropical, and the soil had created precious minerals that hadn't existed since the time of Earth-that-was.

Chuck shakes his head. They had been there just for shiny fucking rocks.

He forces open the hatch door to his bunk with about three times as much force as necessary, taking a perverse pleasure in the way it almost breaks off until he remembers that he'd probably have to weld a new hinge from scratch. And then he remembers that the only scrap metal in the galaxy is wherever the Reavers leave their latest meals.

These days, even fixing a broken door is a suicide mission.

Chuck's hands scrape against the ladder as he descends, as much a product of his hands being calloused and worn as it is the product of poorly polished metal.

When Ellie did the autopsy, they found the parasitic thing in Alex's blood. Something that could only have come from the tropical temperatures of that planet.

Her death isn't from of fighting the alliance or surviving the Reavers or anything with even the slightest bit of pride to it. It's stupid, random chance. The same force that's inexplicably kept him from becoming a Reaver.

Chuck sits on his bed, running both his hands through his hair and leaving them on top of his head. He's the captain. Every death is his fault. Even the ones that aren't.

Especially the ones that aren't.

He hears the hatch above his bunk open and doesn't move. It's Sarah, just like it's always Sarah. When she gets into his room she just sits in the chair across from him. Neither of them can decide who she is to him, who he is to her, anymore. Is she the woman who protected him, who hid him from the Alliance, for years following the Gamma Intersect announcement? Or is he the man who had to lead the armies of an entire contingent of planets, including her, against an invading force?

Given that Casey found them and the people of the Rim have to live in bomb shelters to protect themselves from the Reavers, maybe they're both just failures.

Sarah takes a deep, shaky breath before she says, "I don't."

Chuck looks up at her.

"I don't take you for granted, Chuck."

He knows this is the moment. This is the moment he is supposed to say that he knows and bridge the gap to her and kiss her. He's supposed to make Alex's death mean something by realizing how short life is and not waste it thinking about the history between him and Sarah. He's supposed to throw caution to the wind. He's supposed to...

But it's been a long time since Chuck has done anything except what he has to.

He stays silent.

Shipboard romances complicate things.


	5. Dirt

**Standard Year 2517**

Above their heads, the sounds of the Reavers traveling make noises like distant bombs dropping on their underground cavern. Chuck doesn't stop his fingers digging, but still takes a mental moment to thank whatever deities may still exist that Reavers move in the haphazard, improvised rhythms of jazz percussion, as opposed to the lockstep resonant frequencies of military precision. If the Reavers ever found out they could take down bridges just by marching in the same time...

Chuck's fingers grab at more dirt, shoveling it behind him onto the ground of their mobile tomb, where Sarah shuffles it back to Casey, where Casey packs it into the wall behind them.

They're in a hamster cage made of wet earth. Chuck's not sure if his plan is the most wildly ingenius one he's ever come up with, or just the most apropos, since their bodies will all likely be trapped underground before they get off this planet anyway. But they'd been tired, and thirsty. So tired that not even Casey had had enough energy to muster up his usual insults and complaints about any of Chuck's plans. So thirsty that even the thought of muddy water sucked straight from the earth sounded like a gift from the heavens.

Between scoops of dirt from Chuck, Sarah pushes her hands deep into the soft, wet earth below them, scooping up the disgusting brown water that squeegees to the surface in her canteen. The canteen is near full now, but they only drink out of it every twelve hours, both to preserve their water supply, and because they don't want to take off their oxygen masks for too long. Their hole is only about the size of a water closet, and using up the oxygen too quickly would spell certain death if their tanks were to run out.

Which, of course, they are. Running on less than four hours total. Because, Chuck thinks bitterly, why the hell not.

When they had first dug the tunnel, the idea was to just dig the tunnel, leaving an escape route in case they needed to run, but two things became apparent quickly: if they were going to be running, it'd probably be away from something coming down the hole they'd left; and if they wanted to have that exit, they were going to have to haul the dirt across the entire length of the tunnel every time. And Ellie and Awesome's signal was over seven miles away.

Thus, the walking tomb.

Above them, the ruined city had once housed thousands of buildings, but it had also had plant life strewn across the medians and over the sidewalks, because people just lost their minds if they couldn't see things that weren't man-made. Though everything else has crumbled, the roots of those plants now thrive, twisting down through the earth and popping through the ceiling of their makeshift subway. Casey, he grabs the roots as they come, pulling whatever he can down. It's not much, but it does kind of count for food.

They work in silence, watching the distance on Ellie and Awesome's beacon count down from 11.265408 kilometers in increments of single millimeters. 0.378119. 0.378118. Sometimes Chuck pushes himself deeper into the earth just for the satisfaction of seeing the number go down, even if it pops right back up again once he returns to digging.

The last thing he had said to Sarah was that he would kiss her.

It's a practiced motion of his arm that signals that they need to take a break, take their fifteen minutes for drinking sewer water and eating the roots of decorative plants. It makes him think of leading armies, and the gulf of distance between himself and Sarah, and Morgan, and Alex holding Morgan, and Alex. When he sits down, it makes a loud, ugly thud.

Opening the mask of his suit, Chuck is hit by just how _hot_ it is down here, the sweat of the planet itself, of the half-dead foliage above, of the millions of long-silenced footsteps, of the three people tucked underneath its surface. He can almost taste the dank, arid flavor of it all. He'd hate it, but its a reminder that this planet is still alive. That _they're_ still alive. Chuck drinks out of his canteen and tries not to vomit.

They sit in silence which hangs as oppressively as the humid air of their hamster ball, refusing to make eye contact with one another. If they did, Chuck knows that all they would see would be varying degrees of hopelessness. He's not sure if that even bothers him anymore.

Chuck chews on a few roots, and he can't even taste any difference between it and the water.

He looks up just for a moment, a moment in which he notices in his periphery that Casey and Sarah both have their heads ducked. He looks at his crew, what's left of it. And for maybe the first time Chuck notices exactly how this all has changed the two of them. Casey looks so much older than he should, the furrows of anger that once crossed his face running into tributaries of stress wrinkles. His eyes have gone from their steely, metallic blue to a more muted, subdued color.

And Sarah. Her skin, once a flawless and smooth pane of glass, is now marked with wounds and dirt and worry. She's paler than Chuck can ever remember her, not from cold, but because her body needs more and more to keep her going, and it's receiving less and less. She looks vulnerable in a physical way, which is different from anything Chuck has ever seen, and it makes him so sad.

The last thing he told her is that he was going to kiss her.

He finishes his roots and slides the visor of his helmet down. He feels the rush of cool air from his internal life support systems like false hope. It's a practiced motion of his arm that signals it's time to start digging again.

And then the footsteps start again. Stumbling over each other as before, but this time right above their heads.

_Right_ above their heads.

Loose earth shakes free of its confines above them, raining down like wartime shrapnel. Chuck only barely resists the instinct to cover his eyes. The pounding is pure tribal battle drums, or the ugly thunder of perpetual storm planets. The layers between the Reavers and them thin like peeling bits of plastic wrap apart from each other. Within seconds, a solid two inches of soil is at their feet instead of above their heads.

The three of them share a look of insane panic, the fear of certain death grabbing a hold of them simultaneously. They allow it to take control of them for one second, two seconds, three, and then Chuck swallows and pushes it down, and repeats his practiced motion of the arm.

_Get to work_.

They do, but with an edge of desperation, and Chuck imagines they look like hamsters feverishly attempting to escape their ball. Instead of the calm, workman-like assembly line they had established, the three of them tear at the wall in front of them, uncaring of where the earth falls. It doesn't matter. If they don't get out of here, they'll just be future Earth. Chuck wonders idly how many disintegrated bones are in his hands right now.

The pounding gets louder, the roar of starship engines but in rhythm, and the crust above them keeps thinning. They had once visited a planet where the precipitation was methane-based and the snow at the poles was horrid brown color, and now it looks like that, right down to the muted colors Chuck can see through his visor. In passing, Chuck wonders if maybe they died there, long before the war and the Gamma Intersect, and the rest of all this has just been Hell. He doesn't know if it matters.

The beacon reads 0.364933.

Scrabbling madly, Chuck's fingers suddenly bend against something thick and hard and tangible. He stops for a moment, confused, before diving back in with his arms. Like before, they hit a solid, uncompromising surface.

Inside his suit, a cold sweat breaks out. He sees Sarah and Casey, a few inches shallower than he is in their digging, look at him through their peripheral vision. Shaking it off without any observable movement, Chuck tries again.

It's still there.

There is an earthquake around them and something in their way. He sees Casey and then Sarah retract at the same feeling, curiosity and terror both crossing their expressions. With determination, they scratch away the dirt from the surface, and as more falls away, the material blocking their path slowly reveals itself.

It's bark. The pattern of the wood tells the Intersect everything it needs to know.

In a city that had been completely paved over, every tree uprooted and replaced with synthetic approximations of life, one lone tree root had somehow remained, buried beneath the soil because it was too wide across to be pulled and too hefty to be vaporized. So it sat beneath one of a hundred thousand buildings until, less than 400 yards from the beacon marking the location of Ellie and Awesome, it stands definitely in front of them, impeding any further progress.

Because they're going to die, half of the roof caves in under the stampeding footsteps of the Reavers.

Chuck can't help it; he laughs. It's a maniacal, outlandish thing that echoes roundly in his helmet until it sounds like it's coming from everywhere at once. Casey looks at him like he's crazy, and the look is both familiar and distant, a reflection of a time when the tall man used to have to wipe the snot from Chuck's nose. All that does is make Chuck laugh harder. Desperately and with huge gasps of breath and incoherent intervals, his laugh rattles out his lungs and fogs up the interior of his helmet.

They're all gong to die because of a fucking tree.

Not because of Reavers or the Alliance. Not because of the Intersect War or a smuggling job gone wrong. Not even because of old age, though Chuck knows that was never in the cards for them.

It's a tree that kills them.

He's laughing so hard he can barely breathe.

The dirt shakes free with such ease now that Chuck wonders how it ever held together at all, this dry soil unbound to its adjacent brethren due to years of drought, the only water a tepid cesspool that lingered under the surface for years with no movement. The dirt falls in clumps and Chuck leans back against the tree impeding their path and takes in the moment of their deaths.

Through the painful hysteria, he sees that Sarah and Casey see it, too. He sees the life leave their body through their shoulders, which go from tense with the anxiety of living to slack with the knowledge of fatality. Through the fog of his visor, Chuck sees his entire life before him, a series of progressively more ridiculous, fateful cock-ups that cast him, Pinocchio strings and all, as some sort of savior. A savior that let almost everyone he loved die, and then died himself.

The laughs subside.

Chuck takes his last deep breath.


End file.
